Acknowledgement of messages in communication systems can be used for and to simplify higher-level layers. Typically, acknowledgement is sent from the receiver back to the sender. In embedded communication systems where communication is often multicast (multiple receivers) and the reception status of messages is often a system-wide status that—if known—can be used on the application e.g. to manage redundancy sets or to built a system-wide operational status of the participants in communication (where the reception of a non-faulty message is equivalent to the operation status of a node for a dependable communication where message send or message receive failures get mapped to node failures).